>>501602
AMD processor: if you need powerful graphics, it's always better to cut the price on the CPU and invest the difference in a better graphics card
AMD graphics card: AMD>NVIDIA in performance/price
8 GB RAM: a bit on the short side, but will let you run everything
500 watt: it's always good to add 50% extra power and have a stable voltage in the system than push the PSU to a more unstable voltage and fry your hardware

>>501680>AMD graphics card: AMD>NVIDIA in performance/price
Lmfao. Nope. That hasn't been true since 6xx series. Also, AMD is rapidly loosing market share, has let go of over 1000 employees, lost top talent, and is getting almost no support from developers of games and software. Plus you're getting extra quality, in both hardware, features and drivers with Nvidia. And it's well known that AMD cards have a lot of issues with 3D production software.

OP, you want at least 16GB of RAM, preferably 24GB+
Get and Intel i7 CPU, preferably an unlocked lower clocked one so you can overclock it to the performance of the more expensive ones.

Uh, no. I'd recommend not getting a Radeon card. They're fantastic for gaming, don't get me wrong, but this is NOT a gaming PC. Most 3D software is designed for nvidia and features that only nvidia cards posses, mainly CUDA cores. Also, don't bother with a 2GB card, go 4GB, you'll need it for texturing. If you've got the cash go for EVEA. My 670 is still doing fantastic 3+ years in.

>>501784> My 16 gigs has served me fine through massive renders.
I had meant to write "If you don't want to have to close shit down sometimes, go with more than 16GB". With Chrome+Adblock, Skype, Steam, and your 3D software open, among all the other smaller things, shit starts to add up. I was using 12GB for a while but was hitting my limit quite often due to how hungry Adblock gets these days, on top of the gigabytes that ZBrush and Maya would be using together. Now at 24GB I'm still managing to get close to the limit since I'm free to utilize more, but it's rare.

>>501789
So much professional software is CUDA accelerated, and the Nvidia cards in general just work better, your life will be less stressful. So absolutely go Nvidia when you can, 970 is decent.

I wouldn't really go for i5, they are the mid-range CPUs. Skylake i5 is decent, but it's only 4 threads. Go with i7 so you can get hyperthreading and thus 2 threads per core. With a 6-core i7-5820K, you'll get 12 threads. And an X99 mobo to go with it.

You want to build something that will last you years and really punch through your work.

>>501946
when we say "dedicated machine" it typically means a system designated for a single purpose.

The poster above sounds like he's only got one computer and uses it to skype and play facebook games while he's working.

If you use your old pc to go online, chat, and whatever, and you truly dedicate a machine for modelling, you don't need half those specs.
most of you programs cant even use more than one core, and a couple GB of ram.

the biggest advantage of having an offline machine (not connected to the internet) is you don't need the biggest resource hog ever, anti-virus software. without anti-virus software, any system runs twice as fast. test things with your regular pc before moving it to the offline system if you're worried about viruses.

no skype or other ridiculous video intensive programs running in the background, no steam, no advertising overflows from facebook, everything unnecessary removed and or disabled... you'll be able to do 3 times as much with half the machine.
truly dedicate the machine to what it's dedicated to

>>501968
If you think Skype, Chrome and Steam have any real impact on performance, you are fucking stupid and know nothing about software. 3 times as much with half the machine, lmfao, just how performance intense do you think those programs are, they don't even take up 0.1% of your CPU performance m8.

The better the hardware you get, the faster programs like ZBrush and Maya will operate, that's the point of getting hardware like that. Can you get by on lesser hardware? Of course, but why do that if you can afford more?

>>502005
not that guy, but software like chrome and steam (I don't know about skype) will allocate large chunks of memory on the GPU to do stuff (rendering fonts, compositing websites, ...) so they do take away from the VRAM available for other stuff. It's not a huge issue, but VRAM is definitely not as plenty as normal RAM.

>>502006
shift+esc in chrome, you'll see a process called "GPU Process", that is using up GPU VRAM, kill it. Skype doesn't GPU render, nor does Steam. Steam will allow GPU compositing for its overlay on games, but you have to be running a game for that.

Have two computers in your home, one for work and one for gaming, is idiotic, when both activities require the same good hardware to do things. Want to have better game graphics? Better CPU and GPU. Want to have better modeling/rendering capabilities? Better CPU and GPU, maybe a bit more RAM than usual.

Why waste money having to upgrade two different fucking systems every few years, literally the most retarded thing I've ever heard. Not to mention the extra space it's going to take up.

>>502009
I don't know if killing chromes GPU process is a good idea or actually helps with the VRAM usage. It might just respawn the GPU process. I wouldn't recommend doing that without careful further suggestion. But you can always just turn GPU rendering off in chrome (globally), then it just won't do it at all next time you restart. That's a safe thing to do.

> Skype doesn't GPU render nor does Steam

It does (steam), but even if it doesn't, if you have a compositing window manager (on windows, that means Aero) activated, every application that has a window open will eat at least enough vram to hold its windows texture in GPU memory, probably a good deal more in practice though.

I would expect that skype uses the GPU for some video encoding/decoding related stuff when you are in a video-call. Otherwise it probably doesn't do much with the GPU. Skype uses Qt to render it's UI, and Qt can use GPU accelerated rendering for the user-interface, but it depends on whether you chose to use it or not. Since skype is pretty old, I would expect that it doesn't chose to use GPU rendering and uses the older Qt infrastructure.

In general it doesn't matter much normally, but my desktop GPU only has 2GiB VRAM, so if I render super intense scenes I sometimes do have to turn everything else off.

>>502018>I don't know if killing chromes GPU process is a good idea or actually helps with the VRAM usage
What exactly about it do you think would be bad? Killing a sub-process of Chrome has absolutely no way to harm your computer, nor Chrome even. At the most, it will stop any videos/games being played in your browser, until you refresh the page for them.

> if you have a compositing window manager (on windows, that means Aero) activated
And thus, you just disable Aero.

>I would expect that skype uses the GPU for some video encoding/decoding related stuff
Unfortunately not. Skype is designed to work with very cheap hardware (ironically, it runs like shit on any platform, and thus they fail, but that is their goal), so they shy away from functionality that would rely on hardware acceleration like that. And MPC-HC and VLC do not use GPU encode/decode unless you manually set that up.

1) most rendering is still done on the CPU. IF your program of choice can compile shaders for GPU, then go for a beefy GPU. Otherwise, what matters is stability and the amount of video memory.
2) most professional plugins do like to have CUDA cores at their disposal.
3) If you are on a budget and you still want a good workstation, don't build it with gamer parts. Go on Ebay and look for a used HPZ800, you can get dual socket Xeon x5650's for a very decent price. Add your own storage and you've got a rock solid workhorse.